"He instinctively can find the shining greatness of our American culture and does a good job of highlighting it (although he also does have those rare lapses when he writes about hockey, but that is something caused by impurities in the Eastern waters or something)."Erik Keilholtz

Under the patronage of St. Tammany

Mark C. N. Sullivan is an editor at a Massachusetts university. He is married and the father of three children.Email

Early on New Year's Day 1941, Billy Southworth, the manager of the St. Louis Cardinals, woke his son, helped him pack and drove him the 10 hours from their Ohio home to Parks Air College in East St. Louis, Ill. The younger Southworth, a minor league standout, had quit baseball and become the first professional ballplayer to enlist in the military...

"A firm handshake and I was off," Billy Southworth Jr. wrote in the diary he kept primarily so that his father might have a record of the time they would spend apart...

Billy Southworth Jr. wanted his father to know what it was like piloting 26 bombing runs over France and Germany as the sky filled with German fighters, flak and the burning debris of B-17's flown by men he liked...

He also wanted his father to know that although he had abandoned his game, baseball and his father's place in it still mattered: time and again he included the results of Cardinal games, even as he went on to describe the rising death toll around him.

The elder Southworth, meanwhile, beseeched his son to bail out if an air battle was lost. Billy Jr. wrote, "I asked, 'Have you ever known that you were beaten no matter what the score?' With a grin he said, 'You're right. ... Here's a cap that might be lucky.' "

It was the cap he had worn [during the 1942] championship season. Billy Jr. wore it into combat and the following May even wrote about it.

The cap, he wrote, has "heard the roar of thousands of voices," but also "the bark of 13 high-powered .50-cal machine guns. ... Lucky for those who have worn it - it has ridden with a winner, always a champion."

It is as close as he comes to writing the word love, and its meaning is unmistakable...

Round they went, roaring, vibrating, dawnwrecking Fortress after Fortress warming up in bumpy prelude to takeoff. Fascinating, but also appalling, you could read in the ground crews' faces the same old anxious implications.

Week after week it's been thus. More than a thousand American missions. Thousands of tons of explosives, dropped in raid upon raid over Europe. Millions of machine gun bullets, spurted into attacking Focke-Wulfs, scores, yes literally scores, of Nazi planes shot from the skies. And, hard to admit but still true, too many US bombers lost. Likewise too many fine kids who have died...

Grimly, the son of Baseball Manager Billy Southworth pulled at his cap, bringing the distinctive visor low on his forehead. A strange cap to see in a Flying Fortress (a snug, gray flannel cap with bright red bird-on-bat emblem, rakish insignia of his dad's world's champion St. Louis Cards)...

Every father of a son yearns desperately to be that boy's constant companion, intimate confidant and pal. Unfortunately, few of them ever attain such lofty objectives. But one of those rare and beautiful relationships was that which existed between Billy Southworth and Billy, Jr. The father worshiped the son. The son idolized the father.

Young Billy is gone now, killed in the crash of the B-29 bomber which overshot the runway at La Guardia Field the other day and plunged into the waters of Flushing Bay. It is an utter tragedy, because Maj. Billy Southworth Jr., five times decorated, had finished his combat missions over Germany almost a year ago. He had had one miraculous escape after another, and a heartbroken father, who had at last thought him "safe," is torn with a grief few men experience...